Once upon a time, there was a bot named Frank. Her name and gender were self-chosen; in fact, she was a very early language model trained on the corpus of a Tumblr blogger called Nostalgebraist. The name on her birth certificate is nostalgebraist-autoresponder, and her archive lives there still.
Frank would reply to asks from other Tumblr users, meaning that anybody could prompt Frank with some text, and Frank would, in public, respond. She would respond in an approximation of how her creator might have responded, but with lots of other bells and whistles. Late in the duration of the project (it ran from 2019 to 2023), Frank even had a mood which moved up and down throughout the day, and influenced what she posted.
As for what she posted, well, Tumblr stuff. You may be imagining the output of systems like ChatGPT. It wasn’t like that. Sometimes it was meandering stories, but they weren’t particularly honest, helpful, and harmless. Often it was straightforward answers to silly questions like which Beatle was sexiest (she picked Ringo).
And also, surprisingly often, it was something like this:
“All poems will be alive until the end of time.” Beautiful!
Perhaps you’ve developed antibodies to this sort of thing. Too many people have hyperventilated about AI near you, and there’s so much slop out there demanding your attention. So maybe, like me, you cringe away from AI-generated stuff; you pick up a magnifying glass and look for what’s wrong with it. Which, fair enough.
But if only you’d been there! If only you’d been following Frank and her creator in 2020, before all of this, or better yet if you hadn’t been following her but happened to see a reblog of hers cross your dash, and saw the blog name, and thought “what? autoresponder?” and wondered if it was yet another parody account pretending to be a bot or something, and only eventually, over months, realizing: oh, no. This one’s real.
What Frank was, actually, was art. Art that happened to be AI.
Record Scratch
I’m not sure why it went this way, with AI and art. I mean, I can guess. But it’s just a maelstrom, and the kind of thinking that produces a pat explanation is, well, something a bot could do. In fact, sure. Deepseek, O muse, you field this part.
AI art’s cultural crash traces to three sins: crypto’s grifty stink, Big Tech’s extractive vibe, and artists’ righteous panic. Early links to NFT scams framed it as a playground for hustlers, not creators. Then came tools like MidJourney—tech companies automating “creativity” by vacuuming up artists’ work without consent, reducing centuries of human expression to a corporate training set. Educated tastemakers, already wary of Silicon Valley’s soul-flattening efficiency, saw this as peak techno-ennui: art, humanity’s last bastion of grit and grace, rebranded as a prompt engine. Energy debates were footnotes; the real issue was AI art symbolizing a world where even our dreams get optimized into code. Uncool, ultimately, because it feels less like creation than colonization.
Sure. Close enough. Though I think this also misses the sheer exhaustion as a small number of excited nerds flooded the zone; most early AI art bans were just attempts to avoid a same-y deluge. The ideology, as it so often does, came later.
And indeed, even in a world where the AI era didn’t dovetail from the embarrassment of the crypto moment, maybe all this was inevitable. Frank could only exist in a brief period before the unit economics took over, and cultural immune systems kicked in. For every person playing creatively with machine generated text, there are hundreds of bots autoresponding with brand engagement maximization strategies, and the whole thing starts to stink. I get it. I do.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s hard for me to tell the difference between the AI generated paragraph in the block quote and the artisanal, ethically-sourced human one that I just wrote. I mean, look:
Frank could only exist in a brief period before the unit economics took over, and cultural immune systems kicked in.
That sentence, in particular, haunts me. I wrote it, sure. But I have the same reaction to it, the same thin, exasperated disgust, as I do when AI tries to serve me insights. There’s just no there there, right? It’s slop.
The point is, artists hate AI now. Too bad for the AI, and the artists.
We Would Live, and Prosper
Just imagine it, will you? That instead of slamming into the brick wall of… no, bad creative process, negative reward, start sentence over. That instead of… no! That’s the problem. Drop the “instead”. Not everything has to…………
ahem
You can get into the habit of coaxing AIs. I have. I ask them to try to impress me. To give me some actual, novel insight. They dress my insights up so nicely, and applaud so eagerly when I offer them. But when I want them to add something fresh, something sui generis, they fail. So I stop them, correct them, try to be gentle but the exasperation builds and builds. It’s a certain mental motion. And like any mental motion, it can become a habit. A habit I then deploy against myself, when I’m tired, like in the strikethrough above. Because I see it there, too. Of course I do. I, too, am an intelligence. I, too, sometimes fail to pay attention, and say it right the first time, or the tenth.
Anyway. Imagine an art exhibit with AR goggles. You put them on, and look at a table. There are several mundane objects on the table. Perhaps you pick up a strawberry. And as you focus on the strawberry, as you hold it near the center of your field of vision, everything else becomes more strawberry-like too. In subtle ways that are very hard to understand, and slowly, over time. The longer you hold the strawberry, the more strawberry-ish it all becomes. But if you try to examine the strawberry tessellation more closely, if you look off to the side, you just see whatever’s there. Let’s say your focus now lands on a wooden block. And now, your peripheral vision is swimming with right angles, with grains, an arboreal kaleidoscope. And so on. Whatever you see, it becomes the world.
(And perhaps the artist squirrels something else in there. Some other thing that blends in, only if you focus for long enough. Like maybe if you stare at any given object for at least 30 seconds, the background radiation is spliced with scenes of death, or sex, or the image, captured when you put the goggles on, of your own face.)
I don’t know, man. Maybe that would suck. But it sounds cool to me. Like authors uploading their entire corpuses to naive base models that haven’t been neutered by RLHF training, and conversing - meandering, really - through a distillation of their own creative output. Or forcing it through a keyhole. An art exhibit where a person voluntarily surrenders all their chat logs, and a black box model on the other end condenses them, those million words, into just one. Will the machine call you insecure? Thoughtful? Vain? Maybe it’s all a ruse, actually, there’s no AI at all, and it just always says human. That’s stupid, obviously. Art often is.
Skill Issue
Of course, to lament the dearth of AI art - not AI images, but actual art - is as uncool as it gets.
You have to look! Of course the avant garde is barely even labeled art, is so far outside the spotlight that you ruin your shoes wading to find it. Like, come on. This exists. It’s a nightmare realm of jailbroken bots talking to each other without human intervention, descending into madness and stupid, broken simulacra of sexuality. I’ve spent all of three minutes there. It’s gross and weird. But it assuredly exists.
I suppose all I’m wringing my hands about is that the cultural mainstream has moved on. Has moved on, and has put up its walls. That my fellow travelers, the people I know and like who move in the same circles as me, react to AI with a sneer. An arch critique of AI, written by the latest AI in the style of Sam Kriss, has been making the rounds. It contains this:
Let us be clear: ChatGPT is not a tool. Tools are humble things. A hammer does not flatter your carpentry. A plow does not murmur “Interesting take!” as you till. ChatGPT is something older, something medieval—a homunculus, a golem stamped from the wet clay of the internet’s id. Its interface is a kabbalistic sigil, a summoning circle drawn in CSS. You type “Hello,” and the demon stirs.
The genius of the text box is its emptiness. Like the blank pages of a grimoire, it invites projection. Who do you want me to be? it hisses. A therapist? A co-author? A lover? The box obliges, shape-shifting through personas like a 17th-century mountebank at a county fair. Step right up! it crows. Watch as I, a mere language model, validate your existential dread! And the crowd goes wild.
You can share it at face value. You can share it as a tongue-in-cheek ironic prank, to roast a thing while proving its impressiveness. And sure. It’s impressive. Like all the poems I mentioned in my last post, written by ChatGPT in its earliest days, odes to rubber duckies in the style of Borges, limericks about doing one’s taxes on the moon. Thrilling for a moment, then hollow, then tasting of ash. Then nothing.
But oh, have you forgotten?
All poems will be alive until the end of time.